I started a new job today, and I’m honestly confused. This morning, I picked up my laptop with IT, then went back home. Since then, I’ve had no onboarding, no training, no meetings, and no tasks. I messaged my team lead on Teams, but I haven’t received a reply.
I spent the day reading HR documents and browsing the company intranet, but I still have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not even added to any Teams channels, and I don’t know who my teammates are. I only found my team lead’s name by chance.
I started at 8:00 a.m., and it’s now 3:00 p.m. with complete silence.
Is this normal? What would you do?

Edit: I got a reply from HR telling me to contact the manager I already messaged twice… I still haven’t received a response. I don’t even have my development environment set up yet.

Just a bit of a warning for you all.

We hired a new AWS engineer, lets call him Johnny, who was supposed to join our team today. He did hop on the teams chat for the morning standup to introduce himself, and reception was pretty choppy. After our entire team introed ourselves, he said that he'll be working from out of state for the next couple of month until his kids graduates and then he'll be moving to assume a full time on-prem position.

Later today I get an invite to a mandatory meeting. Apparently, Johnny was not Johnny but a person from North Korea with stolen identity. He passed all background checks and everything else, but used non-existing shipping address to get his work laptop shipped to. The real Johnny actually working for Microsoft, when he was contacted he said that he's been bombarded with positions for the past month or so, but not planning to switch jobs.

So, watch out, if you aren't job hunting and start getting invites from recruiters, maybe its something fishy.

If you read reddit, there is a job apocalypse in tech. Yet, official unemployment rates are still around 5% despite all the layoffs in the news and AI.

So I'm trying to figure out whether all this doom and gloom is just a reddit thing, or if there genuinely is a shortage of CS jobs that employers keep telling us about.